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For Frieze London 2021, Kavi Gupta is proud to present a selection of new and historically important works by Young-Il Ahn (1934—2020); Inka Essenhigh; Beverly Fishman; Jeffrey Gibson; Deborah Kass; James Little; Manuel Mathieu; Tomokazu Matsuyama; Esmaa Mohamoud; Kour Pour; Clare Rojas; and Mary Sibande.
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Jeffrey Gibson combines Native American traditions with the visual languages of Modernism to explore the contemporary confluence of personal identity, culture, history, and international social narratives. Gibson is a member of the Chocktaw and Cherokee nations. He currently lives and works in Hudson, New York. Growing up, Gibson lived for long periods of time in Germany, Korea, and the United States. Wherever he lived, he found a home and friendship in the music scene, at various times exploring the traditions of the punk, rave, and PowWow scenes.
These influences, along with Gibson’s multicultural perspective and deep knowledge of art history, contribute to his personal style. His work manifests across several dynamic and diverse bodies of work, in which traditional native materials like animal hides, beads, and tipi poles intermingle with modern mediums like spray paint, acrylics, ceramic, and tape.
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MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF GIBSON'S WORK INCLUDE JEFFREY GIBSON: WHEN FIRE IS APPLIED TO A STONE IT CRACKS, BROOKLYN ART MUSEUM, NEW YORK, NY, USA; JEFFREY GIBSON: CAN YOU FEEL IT, KAVI GUPTA, CHICAGO, IL, USA; SHE NEVER DANCES ALONE, TIMES SQUARE ARTS, NEW YORK, NY, USA; JEFFREY GIBSON: THIS IS THE DAY, BLANTON MUSEUM OF ART, AUSTIN, TX, USA; WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART, CLINTON, NY, USA; JEFFREY GIBSON: THE ANTHROPOPHAGIC EFFECT, THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK, NY, USA; JEFFREY GIBSON: LIKE A HAMMER, DENVER ART MUSEUM, DENVER, CO, USA; AND LOVE SONG, ICA, BOSTON, MA, USA. GIBSON IS A RECIPIENT OF NUMEROUS AWARDS, NOTABLY THE MACARTHUR FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP (2019); JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION PAINTERS & SCULPTORS AWARD (2015); AND CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION GRANT (2005). GIBSON’S WORK IS INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, THE SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, THE DENVER ART MUSEUM, THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS BOSTON, THE EITELJORG MUSEUM, AND THE NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, AMONG OTHERS.
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Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Kass is a fan of popular culture and a rigorous student of art history, and considers all of the existing artistic content as useful material from which to draw. She has gotten the most attention for her appropriation of Andy Warhol’s signature screenprints. Kass uses the Warhol technique to create empowering, feminist images of females from art history and popular culture.
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Says Kass, “I use history as a readymade. I use the language of painting to talk about value and meaning. How has art history constructed power and meaning? How has it reflected the culture at large? How does art and the history of art describe power?”
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KASS’S WORK HAS BEEN SHOWN NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY, INCLUDING AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, THE ISTANBUL BIENNALE, AND THE MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE. THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM PRESENTED DEBORAH KASS, BEFORE AND HAPPILY EVER AFTER, MID-CAREER RETROSPECTIVE IN 2012, WITH A CATALOGUE PUBLISHED BY RIZZOLI. HER MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE OY/YO IN BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK BECAME AN INSTANT ICON AND IS NOW INSTALLED IN FRONT OF THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM. WORK BY KASS IS IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART, SOLOMON GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, JEWISH MUSEUM, MUSEUM OF FINE ART, BOSTON, CINCINNATI MUSEUM, NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE, FOGG/HARVARD MUSEUM, AND MANY OTHER MUSEUMS AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS. IN 2018 KASS WAS INDUCTED INTO THE NATIONAL ACADEMY. IN 2014 KASS WAS INDUCTED INTO THE NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS HALL OF FAME.
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Manuel Mathieu’s aesthetic evolution reflects his Haitian upbringing, and articulates his positionality from a multitude of realities and perspectives. Reposing on his own multiplicity, the abstractness of his work conveys the abundance in existing at the intersection of racial, geographical, and cultural identities. He presents historical paintings that rely on emotive and speculative thinking as a form of knowledge production.
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Mathieu abandons figurative or didactic western traditions for a more interactive mode of interpretation where the viewers are actively participating in formulating their under-standing of the work. Marrying abstract and figurative techniques, Mathieu’s compositions carve out space for us to reflect on a sense of polyphonic reality that forgoes absolute truth and draws from our collective imaginary.
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Major exhibitions of Mathieu’s work include Manuel Mathieu: World Discovered Under Other Skies, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Negroland—A Landscape of Desires, Kavi Gupta Chicago, USA; Manuel Mathieu: Survivance, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, Canada; The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, USA; Over My Black Body, curated by Eunice Bélidor and Anaïs Castro, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada; Manuel Mathieu: Nobody Is Watching, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; and Manuel Mathieu: Wu Ji, HdM Gallery, Beijing, China. Mathieu has been invited to the artist residency at the Art House in Sonoma, CA, in 2021.
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James Little is an American abstract artist whose distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships. Little utilizes a method similar to the encaustic painting technique used by ancient Egyptian and Greek artists, blending handmade pigments with hot beeswax.
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While developing his unique position within contemporary abstraction, Little has devoted decades to rigorous academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. His practice embodies the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.
“I’m not cutting edge,” he says. “I’m just trying to stand up next to the great paintings of the past. It’s like building a building. The things that are going to make it stand are the same as they’ve always been. You have to have a solid foundation. I approach painting the same way.”
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Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is the 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Award for Painting. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA P.S.1; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; St. Louis Art Museum; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Currently, his work is on view in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Newark Museum, Newark.
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A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama (b. 1976, Gifu, Japan) has developed a singular aesthetic that expresses what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” Matsuyama’s works feature amalgams of references, including figures borrowed from fashion magazines; clothing reminiscent of historic Japanese garments; backgrounds evocative of Shogun-era screens and panels; curved canvases that simultaneously recollect mid-century Modernist Minimalism and the far more ancient history of shaped tea platters; and elements such as a junkyard tire and a bag of potato chips that situate the images starkly in the present age, and spotlight popular culture as embodied by mass-produced commodities.
The astoundingly vivid surfaces of his paintings project an almost digital brilliance, yet, upon close inspection, a delicate and meticulous, painterly reality becomes clear.
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Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; and Made in 17 hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among others. Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; and The Dean Collection (Swizzbeats and Alicia Keys), USA; among many others.
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South African artist Mary Sibande interrogates the current intersections of race, gender, and labor in Pos-Apartheid South Africa. Her work actively rewrites her own family’s legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then-Apartheid state. Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle for a focused critique of stereotypical depictions of women, particularly Black women in South Africa. For Sibande, the body is the site where history is contested and where Sibande’s own fantasies can play out.
This counter-history takes the form of an alter-ego in Sibande’s work, a persona by the name of Sophie, who is dressed in various uniforms that allow her to occupy the narratives that were stolen from and denied to her. Transforming through a series of symbolic color periods, from Blue to Purple to Red, Sophie takes on new incarnations of herself unbound from the history of servitude and labor.
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Based in Johannesburg, Sibande represented South Africa in the 2011 Venice Biennale; Lyon Biennial; Dakar Biennial; and Havana Biennial, among others. She has exhibited internationally at the Met Breuer, New York, USA; British Museum, London, UK; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; JAG (Johannesburg Art Gallery), Johannesburg, South Africa; Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA; Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Museum Beelden aan Zee, Hague, Netherlands; and Somerset House, London, UK, among others. Sibande’s works are included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, USA; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, USA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, USA; Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town, South Africa; and Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France, among others.
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African-Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud (b. 1992, Canada) describes her studio practice as an examination of “the monolithic versus the multitude.” Her work is a visually stunning and profound examination of the gap between contemporary culture's oversimplification and diminishment of Black people, compared to the complexity, richness, and diversity of their actual lived experiences.
Mohamoud’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, which toured the National Galleries of Canada, looks specifically at how the Black body is reduced within the vernacular of athleticism. Sculptures such as Glorious Bones critique depictions of the Black body as being disposable, while the photographic series One of the Boys examines the vulnerability of Black masculinity within the guise of professional sports.
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Mohamoud is a 2021 Artist-in-Residence in Kehinde Wiley’s renowned Black Rock Senegal residency program in Dakar, Senegal. Her critically acclaimed solo exhibition To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat (originated at Museum London in Ontario) is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), and will travel in 2022 to the Art Gallery of Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Winnipeg, concluding at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2023. In 2022, Mohamoud’s work will be included in the exhibition Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Montreal; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG, Greensboro, NC, USA, among others. Works by Mohamoud are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; Weatherspoon Museum; Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan; Museum London; and University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries, among others.
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Beverly Fishman explores technological, scientific, and biological systems of perception and representation, instigating constructive conversations about the ways people see their bodies and minds and form their identities. Her most illustrious works engage with the visual language of the medical industrial complex. Her highly polished Pill reliefs utilize pharmaceutical forms as the basis for seemingly abstract compositions that radiate with color. Fishman is interested in how humanity sees itself and allows itself to be seen; the extent to which technology alters our perception of ourselves; and the choice between altering our reality and altering our experience of it.
In addition to traditional supports, such as wood, paper, blown glass and aluminum, and unconventional elements, like cast resin, mirrored Plexiglass, powder-coated metal, and phosphorescent pigments, Fishman uses mediums like chrome and urethane automotive paint that speak to the legacy of the Detroit area, where she lives and works.
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Fishman served as the head of painting and as artist-in-residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art for twenty-seven years. Recent major exhibitions of Fishman's work include I Dream of Sleep, Miles McEnery, New York, NY, USA; Future Perfect, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now, curated by Dr. Emily Stamey, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, USA; DOSE, curated by Nick Cave, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Pill Spill, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI, USA; and Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and in Health, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, USA. Fishman has recieved numerous awards, including the 2018 Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; and the NEA Fellowship Grant. Work by Fishman is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and many others.
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For Clare Rojas, storytelling manifests in many different ways: sometimes visually, as a painting, drawing, or sculpture; other times musically, as a song. Yet one similarity Rojas has noticed between these various forms of expression has to do with reduction. Her songwriting pares down the essence of a story to something that can be conveyed in minutes, just as the essence of form and line in her abstract visual compositions is reduced to an examination of the tension of balance.
Her visual language proliferates from a personal totemic form unrooted to figurative meaning, but evocative of the shape of a drop of water or a mountain. The form has evolved over time, from an abstract shape that Rojas instinctively drew to something concrete she began noticing in her everyday visual environment. Says Rojas, “The more I drew it, and meditated on the shape, the more I saw it everywhere I looked. I found it in the figure, in nature, in water, in land, in animals.”
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Rojas' Recent projects include a site specific commission for facebook headquarters in San Francisco, CA and the Art in Embassies Program in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Egret, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL: The House Imaginary, San Jose Museum of Art, CA; New Works at Anglim Gilbert San Francisco; selftitled shows at Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld, New York and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Pith at Prism, Los Angeles; and We They at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, CA. Rojas’ work has been reviewed in such publications as the Huffington Post, Artforum International Magazine, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, and Art Review.
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Inka Essenhigh is renowned for her dreamlike paintings, which translate her encounters with, and intuitions about, contemporary society into haunting, playful, sometimes disturbing visual scenes. Her most recent series, titled Uchronia, envisages a hypothetical, idyllic future for the inhabitants of Earth. Essenhigh is part of a generation of artists that includes Rachel Feinstein, Lisa Yuskavage and Cecily Brown, that rose to prominence in 1990s New York as leaders in the contemporary return to figuration.
She employs a mix of automatism, imagination and “inner vision” to translate the visible world into arabesque enamel paintings that reveal the unseen worlds of energy, feeling and mystery that lurk just beyond everyday life.
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Recent exhibitions of Essenhigh's work include Inka Essenhigh: Uchronia, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Inka Essnhigh: Other Worlds, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; SIte Specific Installation, Drawing Center, New York, USA; Inka Essenhigh: Between Worlds, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, USA Inka Essenhigh: A fine line, Virginia MOCA, Virginia Beach, VA, USA; Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making, MOMA, New York, USA; USA Today, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gardens, London, England; 2nd Berlin Biennale, Berlin, DE; Supernova, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA; Hybrids, Tate Gallery, Liverpool, England and Bienal de S.o Paulo, Brazil. Work by Essenhigh is in the collections of the Tate, the Denver Art Museum, MOMA / P.S.1, San Francisco MOMA, the Seattle Art Museums, and many others.
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Young-Il Ahn (b. 1934 - d. 2020) developed a distinctive oeuvre defined by meticulous, abstract paintings that explore his relationship with beauty, nature, and music. Ahn’s most famous body of work, the Water series, has been associated with Dansaekhwa, an aesthetic position specific to Korea characterized by the expression of natural processes through a monochromatic palette.
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Ahn was born in 1934 in Gaesong, a city now located in North Korea, which was then considered part of colonial Japan. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1966, he became enamored with the famous Southern California light, especially the interplay of sunlight on surfaces. One day, on a fishing trip between Santa Monica and Catalina Island, Ahn had the harrowing experience of becoming lost in a dense fog. When the fog finally lifted, the sea around him was completely calm. The sunlight shimmered on the waves. He wrote about that moment in his autobiography, And still it flows towards me: A Life Lived with Art: “My favorite colors from nature stretched to infinity. The sunlight crashed and reflected against the water every moment, dispersing splendid and sparkling colors in layers.” The experience inspired Ahn to create his Water series, on which he worked for more than 30 years, until his death.
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In 2015, Ahn had his first solo museum exhibition, A Memoir of Water, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. In 2018, he became the first ever Korean American painter to receive a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Ahn's paintings are included in the collections of LACMA, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, among others. Recent exhibitions include the retrospective Young-Il Ahn at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA.
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British-Iranian artist Kour Pour creates meticulously composed and delicately rendered artworks which intersect diverse material and aesthetic traditions, allowing for a remapping of the standard understanding of “Eastern/Western” cultural exchange. Appropriating forms and techniques from numerous cultures and time periods, Pour’s truly global vision weaves together representational imagery, abstract patterning, and ornamental elements to create new hybrid artworks—equally ancient, classical, and contemporary—a constellation of influences from Iran, Britain, Egypt, India, and China, among others.
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These global references are used as starting points for his paintings, in which a source image is often cropped, abstracted, or adjusted in palette to create vivid, intricate, and layered painting surfaces. Kour’s synthesis of image and process often connects different art histories in an attempt to highlight the cultural exchanges that lead to artistic innovation and disrupt the notion of singular originality.
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Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Returnee at The Club, Tokyo, 2019; Manzareh/Keshiki/Landscape at Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, 2019; Abrash at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, 2018; Polypainting at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2018, and GNYP Gallery, Berlin, 2018. Select group exhibitions include Gold Standard: Ten Year Anniversary Exhibition at Ever Gold [Projects], 2019); Decoration Never Dies, Anyway at Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, Tokyo, 2017; and Labyrinth(s) at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2016. A solo exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran is forthcoming in 2022.
Kavi Gupta, FRIEZE London 2021
Past viewing_room
